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On a bright fall morning at Stanford, Tom Mullaney is telling me what's wrong with QWERTY keyboards. Mullaney is not a technologist, nor is he one of those Dvorak keyboard enthusiasts. He's a historian of modern China and we're perusing his exhibit of Chinese typewriters and keyboards, the curation of which has led Mullaney to the conclusion that China is rising ahead technologically while the West falls behind, clinging to its QWERTY keyboard.
Now this was and still is an unusual view because Chinese—with its 75,000 individual characters rather than an alphabet—had historically been the language considered incompatible with modern technology. How do you send a telegram or use a typewriter with all those characters? How do you even communicate with the modern world? If you're a Cambridge-educated classicist enamored with the Greeks, you might just conclude Chinese script is "archaic." Long live the alphabet.
But, Mullaney argues, the invention of the computer could turn China's enormous catalog of characters into an advantage.
His argument is [...] about our relationship to computers, not just as physical objects but as conduits to intangible software. Typing English on a QWERTY computer keyboard, he says, "is about the most basic rudimentary way you can use a keyboard." You press the "a" key and "a" appears on your screen. "It doesn't make use of a computer's processing power and memory and the cheapening thereof." Type "a" on a QWERTY keyboard hooked up to a Chinese computer, on the other hand, and the computer is off anticipating the next characters. Typing in Chinese requires mediation from a layer of software that is obvious to the user.
[...] The Chinese way of inputting text—the software-mediated way—will win out, says Mullaney. Actually, it's already won out. Our mobile phones now have predictive text and autocomplete. It took the constraint of mobile to get Westerners to realize the limits of the simple what-you-type-is-what-you-get keyboard. But even then, you could only get Americans to go so far.
Read more at The Atlantic.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday August 01 2019, @03:28PM (11 children)
Ignoring this article's silly assertion about the superiority of predictive text input, I can take a stab at that.
They are graduating huge numbers of people from University annually (with heavy emphasis on STEM), dumping piles of money in basic science, have a strong modern manufacturing infrastructure, are building transportation infrastructure to empower their rural communities, and are building international supply chain and distribution infrastructure (without blowing people up).
They can build a nuclear power plant in 3 years instead of 30. They can build a high speed rail line from breaking ground to carrying passengers in under 5.
Take an honest dispassionate look at the economic outlook for China, the EU, and the US for the next thirty years and ask yourself which one is poised to grow the most.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Thursday August 01 2019, @03:53PM (3 children)
We're lucky if we can do it in 30. 🙁
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The gene pool is shallow. And polluted.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:33PM (2 children)
The difference in Capitalist Bureaucracy and Communist Bureaucracy. I find it hard to believe that we couldn't build a Nuclear Power Plant in 3 years. It's much more of a cultural/political issue in the USA. We don't just say, we're building a Nuclear Power Plant, then build it. Which is exactly what China does. You don't say, no, to the government in China. In the USA there's bunches of red tape, there's environmental lobbyists, and the ever changing political climate. Though, given how Solar and Wind are developing, I'm not sure I'm in favor of Nuclear Power Plants at all. The catastrophic failure mode for Solar / Wind is immensely less problematic than a Nuclear Power Plant.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:41PM
That's for old-tech (just the kind of shite you end up with when you have a 30-year get-it-done hill to climb.) There's all manner of better tech available now with a considerably reduced set of such concerns. A nuke also takes up far less real estate per watt, and isn't dependent upon the weather, so there's that.
However, I am also a huge fan of solar. I have an installation here. Two, actually — one portable one for my ham radio trailer, and one for the house. Here in northern Montana, we have oodles of sun.
All I really want is for the coal and oil generation to go away ASAP. The catastrophic results of that are already coming home to roost, and they are far worse than those posed by nukes.
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The only thing flat-earthers have to fear is sphere itself.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday August 01 2019, @06:23PM
Not In My Backyard is one of the few things everyone in the U.S. can agree on
Not even limited to nuke stations, but wind turbines, hell even electrical lines...because "electricity causes cancer" or some other moronic reason.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday August 01 2019, @06:20PM (4 children)
Erm...a nuclear power station is pretty much the only facility that I would *want* people to take their time building, to make sure they get everything right. Because the failure case is so bad if they don't.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday August 01 2019, @07:42PM (3 children)
Think through the implications of that statement. The newest nuclear power plant in my state (Watts Barr) started construction in 1973 and finished construction in 1996 and 2015 (Reactor 1 and 2 respectively). The original designers literally retired and died before the project finished. The oldest components in the system had 40 years of entropy and aging on them before they ever generated a single watt. That's a very long time for something to decay, become obsolete, or lose the institutional knowledge required to operate safely. It's poisoned the entire field as a career dead end, and almost half of the qualified engineers will retire in the next decade.
It's a problem.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday August 01 2019, @08:14PM (1 child)
Okay, maybe 30 years is too long, but I'm not sure the answer is exactly 3 years. There are these numbers between 3 and 30
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Saturday August 03 2019, @04:01AM
It's not really a question of time; It's a question of quality. ElizabethGreene's comment about the original designers retiring and dying before the nuke plant came online is a comment about quality. You can't fix an exact number to a construction project with that kind of complication. Even well managed projects are merely estimates in the beginning with lots of problem solving and adjustments in the schedule along the way.
There are those who can better articulated the absurd reasons it takes so long to bring an American nuke plant online. It is very disheartening to read. I'm too lazy to post links, though. You'll have to Google-Bing-DuckDuck yourself.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday August 01 2019, @09:03PM
See? That's one additional danger of nuke power (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by goodie on Thursday August 01 2019, @06:31PM
I would like to nuance some of these things. Not that I think what you wrote is not true mind you. Just because I think that it depends on how we look at it. I'm not sure any of this is really related to the OP.
China is on the fastest course to having major issues of a scale that is incomparable than what we see in the western world. I'll just take healthcare. Traditionally the Chinese have had a balanced diet made of healthy foods. Now, between the pollution, the proliferation of junk food (both Western and Eastern), we see that this population is going to get worse problems with diabetes and other chronic illnesses much faster than their western counterparts. There is a reason why rich Chinese leave China. It's an incredibly busy place where urban landscapes change radically in weeks/months. But the long term costs are going to be, and are already, huge. Any Chinese I know who lives there tells me it takes them 45 minutes to make a meal because 30 minutes are spent just washing the food.
The Chinese government also likes to go fast. It works well in some cases, but in many others, it leaves unsustainable infrastructure that is not maintained and cannot be fixed. Just look at the nice tall high rises they build. Maybe the structure is sound, but the finishings are often of very poor quality. It's done fast and not well, it won't last. That does not mean that the western countries know how to do it better. It's just that when the government says go, you go even if you think it's a stupid idea. Because otherwise bad things happen to you. The Transit Elevated Bus is a recent example of that but there are many others. Again, not that don't have that problem in the West.
As for STEM graduates, there is an incredible number indeed. But these are highly specialized, number-crunching people who are very good at the one thing they were trained for. Critical thinking, autonomy etc. not so much. I generalize of course but it's a trend I have observed and discussed with colleagues over the past few years.
20 years ago, I would have absolutely loved to visit and possibly live in China. Now, not happening.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @08:07PM
So could anyone if they had a blatant disregard for people or safety.